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Climate change may halve giant panda’s habitat by 2070

Posted by Mike Confino, January 10, 2015

Giant pandas, prepare to move out. Shifting these creatures to distant reserves may be essential if they are to survive the likely impacts of climate change.

Pandas are well known for their pernickety bamboo diet and lacklustre sex lives. Wild populations have been reduced to a tiny gene pool and are under new pressure from the explosive growth in road-building in China. Taking these factors into account, Ming Xu of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and colleagues have modelled how pandas’ geographical range could be further affected by climate change.